Bread, pancakes, noodles, and concrete...all thanks to wheat

View full sizeFarmers use a grain head (black piece on front of combine) to harvest the wheat.

The longest day of the year has come and gone. Schools are out, beaches are full, and many are thinking about summer vacations. For some farmers in Michigan, July means it is time to harvest wheat. Many varieties of wheat are planted the previous fall, and are already in full growing season when the corn and soybean fields are being plowed in the spring.

Depending on the weather, as everything does for a farmer, wheat in lower Michigan is usually ready to harvest around mid-July. This year, with the lack of water and the warmer days earlier in the season, the wheat is ready to harvest by early July.

Though wheat fields have turned brown, a farmer still needs to check the wheat before they bring the combine to the field to make sure it is truly ready for

After harvesting the kernels of wheat, the straw (stalks of wheat) remain to be used for livestock bedding.

harvesting. To find out if the wheat is ready, the farmer rubs a wheat head between his hands, blowing the chaff away, and then chewing some of the grain. If the kernels crack easily and get soft as they are chewed, it is ready for the combine. Do you know that in just 9 seconds, a combine harvests enough wheat to make 70 loaves of bread?

A wheat field produces two outputs. The first is the actual kernels of wheat that are loaded on a semi-trailer and taken to town to sell for processing. The second output from a wheat field is the straw. After the combine goes through and harvests the wheat, it leaves behind rows of the chaff, debris. The farmer then bales the chaff (straw) up and uses it for animal bedding.

When you think about wheat, what type of products do you think about? Carbohydrate-related ones? Wheat contains valuable protein, minerals, and vitamins. The protein in wheat, when balanced by other foods that supply certain amino acids, such as lysine, is an efficient source of protein.

As you are driving around the country in the next few weeks, consider the size of the wheat fields. One acre of wheat will produce about 2,500 loaves of wheat bread. Can you smell the bread baking in the oven? Yummy.

View full sizeMillions of wheat kernels are being loaded in carts and in semi-trailers throughout Michigan.

Wheat can also be found in many other products. It's in your wallboards, cosmetics, pet foods, newsprint, soap, trash bags, concrete, medical swabs, charcoal, and alcohol.

Fun facts about wheat:

- There are more than 600 pasta shapes produced worldwide.- Approximately 3 billion pizzas are sold in the US each year.- Each man, woman and child in America eats an average of 46 slices, (23 pounds), of pizza per year. - The first bagel rolled into the world in 1683 when a baker from Vienna Austria was thankful to the King of Poland for saving Austria from Turkish invaders. The baker reshaped the local bread so that it resembled the King's stirrup. The new bread was called "beugel," derived from the German word stirrup, "bugel."- Never refrigerate bagels or any bread product. Bread products go stale up to 6 times faster in the refrigerator. Leave these products at room temperature or freeze them.- To revive several-day-old bagels, microwave very briefly (15 seconds), or moisten with water and bake for 10 minutes in a 350 oven or simply toast them. - Wheat was first planted in the United States in 1777 as a hobby crop.- More foods are made with wheat than any other cereal grain.- About half of the wheat grown in the United States is used domestically.- One bushel of wheat contains approximately one million individual kernels. - A one-and-a-half pound loaf of commercial bread contains 24 slices. - Before 1930, bread was sliced the old fashioned way: by hand.- According to tortilla manufacturers, nearly 60 percent of their products are consumed by non-Latinos.- A survey found that 52 percent of Americans choose chocolate chip as their favorite cookie, with oatmeal next at 17 percent.